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Thursday, May 9, 2013

NEW ORLEANS: Intact America confronts Ob/Gyns at their conference

Intact America Pickets Ob/Gyn Conference

Intact America's mobile banner at the ACOG conference

Genital autonomy activists have gathered in New Orleans to call on
the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to join
the global medical community’s movement away from neonatal male
circumcision.

Intact America held a press conference, placed an advertisement in
the New Orleans Times-Picayune and used a mobile billboard, saying “Tell
America’s Obstetricians – No More Circumcision.” The sign includes the
message “His Body, His Rights” to underscore the organization’s human
rights concerns. Approximately 70 activists were expected to take part
in the demonstration, displaying banners, carrying placards, and handing
out literature

Executive director Georganne Chapin said, "The leaders of ACOG
apparently do not think their members – who, according to estimates,
perform at least half of the one million circumcisions in the United
States on unconsenting baby boys each year – should hear the arguments
that have led medical authorities across the developed world to reject
the surgery as unnecessary, inherently risky, and a violation of baby
boys’ right to an intact body."

The ACOG rejected IA's application to rent space for an educational
booth in the convention’s exhibition hall, saying male circumcision “is
only indirectly related to women’s health and of only casual interest to
members of ACOG.” So Chapin decided Intact America should communicate
with ACOG directly.

“It is both sad and disingenuous that ACOG claims circumcision is of
no interest to the very doctors who perform the surgery hundreds of
thousands of times each year,” Chapin said. “It is also not surprising
they have embraced the widely-discredited 2012 circumcision policy
statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)." That policy
"lauded the benefits of circumcising infants, while admitting that
evidence for such benefits is lacking, acknowledging that the risks have
never been adequately studied, and ignoring the ethical problems
inherent in permanently removing normal genital tissue from individuals
who cannot consent.”

The AAP’s policy was endorsed by ACOG. In contrast, IA endorses the
view of 38 international pediatricians, urologists and medical
ethicists, whose response to the AAP is published in the its own
journal, Pediatrics

“There is growing consensus… that physicians should discourage
parents from circumcising their healthy infant boys,” the physicians
say, “because non-therapeutic circumcision of underage boys in Western
societies has no compelling health benefits, causes postoperative pain,
can have serious long-term consequences, constitutes a violation of the
United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and conflicts
with the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere: First, do no harm.”

“Intact America’s intent for this demonstration in New Orleans,” said
Chapin, “is to make sure ACOG hears and understands the ethical
quagmire they have put themselves into.”